Roger Richman, Distinguished Achievement Award 2001

In the course of a very successful career, Roger Richman always remembered his roots at Tech. He has served on graduate student thesis committees and nurtured faculty and students with joint publications. During his many years of association with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI, a research consortium of utility companies in Palo Alto, Calif.), he has aided or been responsible for many of the research contracts New Mexico Tech has gotten from that organization.

"I have worked most with Dr. Osman Inal and Dr. Gillian Bond of the materials engineering department," said Richman. "With Jill, I have been working on problems related to biomimetics, which is the mimicry of biological systems by non-biological ones. We began by looking over the field to see if there were areas that electric utilities ought to be interested in, and it turned out that there were a number synergies. One had to do with capture and immobilization of carbon dioxide products. Dr. Bond and I have pursued research in this area. With Dr. Inal, I worked on a practical project, putting a desirable coating on plain steel to resist certain kinds of erosion. We did some explosive welding, and the project turned out to be quite successful."

Richman was born in Newark, N.J., and says he came to Tech as "a matter of economics. Tuition was $50 a semester in those days." He started as a mining engineering major but switched over to metallurgy. After graduation, he served in Army for two years; then he began working for the National Lead Company of Ohio, which operated a site for the Atomic Energy Commission. Richman was group leader for uranium production development at the Atomic Energy Commission's Feed Production Center.

After a couple of years, he decided to get a graduate degree and attended Lehigh University, where he got a Ph.D. in 1958. He then went to Ford Motor Co., where, for more than 17 years, he served as supervisor and staff scientist in several departments of the Engineering and Research Staff.

From Ford, Richman went to the Electric Power Research Institute as project manager of materials support in the Fossil Fuels and Advanced Systems Division. At EPRI, Richman provided consultation and project management in R&D involved with metals and ceramics for power generation and coal conversion technologies.

He was then vice president and general manager at Aptech Engineering Services, Inc., an engineering consulting firm in Palo Alto. Since February 1985, he has been Technical Director and a principal at Daedalus Associates, Inc., in Mountain View, California.

Richman and his wife Beverly have been married since 1953. Their son, Joshua, is president of Straw Hat Pizza, a cooperative in California and Nevada.

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